Well, this post is all about charts and figures. Read on to get a glimpse of e-commerce outlook in selected countries of Asia Pacific. Hopefully, you will get a rough idea on those markets that you are not particularly familiar with.




Personally, I am not really convinced with how the penetration rate is weighted in the chart above. Anyway, it is obvious that China has the biggest market in Asia and still with so much room to grow. India on another hand is projected to overtake Japan as the second largest market in this region.

Too bad that Malaysia is missing from the charts above but it is interesting to see that Thailand seems to have good market potential in South East Asia. No wonder Rakuten buys into Thailand's leading e-commerce company.

E-commerce has now become a prevalent activity amongst Australian online users - 80% of them now shop online.

When Australians shop online 37% of them choose online payment system PayPal rather than Visa (22%) as their preferred payment method.

When it comes to the online retailer who attracts the most Australian shoppers, there is one "clear market leader" - eBay, with 56% of online shoppers having bought something from the site.


India currently has 28.1 million online shoppers in its country, which is forecast to mushroom to 203.1 million people come 2010.

When Indian online users do shop online, they, like the rest of the region's shoppers, overwhelmingly prefer to use credit cards, with 60% of them saying they were their most preferred form of online payment, the next popular method being debit cards (24% of users).

Indian online shoppers are more opportunistic than anyone else in the region, with 30% of frequently making impulse purchases, compared to around 10% in Singapore, South Korea and Australia, for example. The items they tend to snap up on impulse are home appliances and electronic products (63% of users) and airline tickets (54%).


Nearly all Japanese Internet users shop online - the country has an online shopping penetration rate of 97%.

More so than anyone else in Asia, the Japanese prefer paying for goods online with their credit cards over any other form of payment method, with 70% of them saying that was the case.

Online shopping is the second most favoured online activity in Japan, after email.


South Koreans love to shop online. Among those who have Internet access, 99.9% have used it to buy something - the highest online shopping penetration rate in the world.

South Korea's Cyworld is the world's second largest music and video retailer after iTunes.

South Korean's online music download market has grown to such an extent that now more music is sold online than traditional offline channels.


Creating that first positive shopping experience is key in order to capture loyalty and money - Malaysian online shoppers tend to stick to the shopping sites they are familiar with, with 60% of saying they buy mostly from the same site.

Malaysian online shoppers mainly buy airline tickets or book travel reservations over the Internet (55% of users), make tour / hotel reservations (41%) and buy computer hardware (22%).


Singaporeans love shopping: 80% of them have shopped online.

Singaporeans are also amongst the highest online spenders in Asia, spending on average US$3,480 online over the period of one year, ahead of Japan, South Korean and Hong Kong.

Singaporean online shoppers like to plan their purchases rather than buy on a whim, with only 10% of them making frequent opportunistic purchases.


Fashion and beauty are the two dominant segments in Taiwan's online shopping market, with compound average growth rates of 88% (fashion) and 49% (beauty).

The statistics above are derived and summarized from Asia Pacific Digital Marketing Yearbook 2009, which can be downloaded here (requires registration).

Related post: Malaysia's E-Commerce Statistics